For a relationship to last forever, a husband needs 2 qualities. Here they are. Here it is, the recipe for everlasting love 😲 💞.
Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, many couples say “I promise,” striving for a long relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love and will last until their death.
But this won’t happen for many of them!
Most marriages will either end in divorce and separation or become purely nominal. Only three out of ten couples will live out their lives in a healthy and happy marriage, notes psychologist Ty Tashiro in his book, The Science of Happiness After Death, which was published this year.
Sociologists first began studying marriage by observing it in action in the 1970s: couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates in response to the recession. After seeing the impact divorce had on children, psychologists decided to observe married people and determine what makes for healthy, lasting relationships.
Was every unhappy family unhappy in its way, as Tolstoy claimed, or were these unhappy marriages the result of one thing?
“Masters” and “disasters.”.
One such researcher was psychologist John Gottman. Over the past four decades, he has studied thousands of couples to find out what makes relationships strong. Gottman and his wife, Julie, also a psychologist, run the Gottman Institute, which uses scientific research to help couples create and maintain loving, healthy relationships.
John Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson founded the Love Lab at the University of Washington and invited newlyweds there to observe how they interacted with each other.
They hooked up couples to electrodes and asked them to talk about their relationships, such as how they met the first major conflict they encountered and the good times in their lives.
As they talked, electrodes measured the subjects’ blood flow, heart rates, and even how much they sweated. The researchers then sent the couples home and checked back six years later to see if they were still together.
From the data they collected, Gottman divided the couples into two main groups: “masters” and “disasters.” “Masters” were still happily married after six years. “Disasters” had either separated or were chronically unhappy in their marriages. When the researchers analyzed the data, they saw clear differences between the two groups.
The “disasters” appeared calm during interviews, but their physiology, as measured by electrodes, told a different story. Their heart rates were racing, their sweat glands were active, and their blood flow was rapid. In a study of thousands of couples, Gottman found that the more physiologically active the couples were in the lab, the faster their relationships deteriorated.
But what does physiology have to do with it? The problem was that the “disasters” showed all the signs of arousal—and were constantly in “fight mode.” Even when they talked about the pleasant or mundane aspects of their relationship, they were ready to attack and be attacked.
This caused their heart rates to increase and made them more aggressive towards each other. For example, each member of the couple might talk about how their days had gone, and a very excited husband might say to his wife, “Why don’t you tell me about your day? It won’t take you long.”
Masters, on the other hand, showed low physiological arousal. They felt calm and connecter, which translated into warm and affectionate behavior, even when they argued. It wasn’t that “masters” were better by default. It was that “masters” created an atmosphere of trust and intimacy that made them less emotional and therefore physically comfortable.
The importance of attention and emotional response.
Gottman wanted to learn more about how to create this loving, intimate atmosphere and how to keep problems from destroying it. In a follow-up study in 1990, he created a pavilion that simulated a bedroom and a kitchen.
There, 130 newlyweds were invited to do what couples do on vacation: cook, listen to music, eat, chat, and lie around. And then he made his discovery.
Throughout the day, partners make requests for closeness, which Gottman calls “bets.” For example, a husband loves birds and suddenly notices a nuthatch running up a tree. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird: He’s asking for a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping that the bird will connect them.
The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away from” her husband, Gottman says. While the bird request may seem insignificant and silly, it can reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring up, and the question is whether the wife will recognize that.
The people who “turned toward” their partners in the study responded by showing interest in the “bid.” Others did not respond or responded minimally and continued doing whatever they were doing, such as watching television or reading the newspaper. Sometimes they responded with open hostility, saying things like, “Stop interrupting me; I’m reading.”
These responses had a profound impact on the couples’ well-being. Couples who divorced after six years had a “betting reversal” 33 percent of the time. Only three out of ten requests for emotional connection were met with intimacy.
Couples who were still together after six years had a “betting turn” 87% of the time. Nine times out of ten, they met their partners’ emotional needs.
Much of this comes down to what couples bring to the relationship. Do they bring kindness and generosity? Or contempt, criticism, and hostility?
Contempt, they found, is the number one factor that kills relationships. People who focus on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of the positive things their partners do, and they see negativity where there is none.
People who intentionally ignore their partner or respond minimally to them damage the relationship by making their partner feel useless and invisible as if they are not there and are not valuable. People who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship but also kill their partner’s ability to fight off viruses and cancer.
Practice kindness.
Kindness, on the other hand, glues people together. Independent studies have shown that kindness (along with emotional stability) is the most important predictor of marital satisfaction and stability. Kindness makes each partner feel cared for, understood, and loved.
“My generosity is as boundless as the sea,” says Shakespeare’s Juliet. “My love is as deep; the more I give you, the more I have left.” And so it is with kindness: there is much evidence that the more someone receives or shows kindness, the more kind they will be themselves, leading to upward spirals of love and generosity in relationships.
There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think of it as a fixed quality: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. Some people have this muscle naturally stronger than others, but it can be strengthened in everyone through exercise.
Psychologists tend to think of kindness as a muscle. People need to use it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that good relationships require constant hard work.
Neglecting small moments of emotional connection will slowly wear down a relationship. Neglect creates distance between partners and breeds resentment in the one being ignored.
The hardest time to practice kindness is during an argument, but it’s also the most important time to be kind. Letting contempt and aggression out of control duringa conflict can cause irreparable damage to a relationship.
The implications are clear: If you want to have a stable, healthy relationship, practice kindness. When people think of practical kindness, they often think of small acts of generosity, like buying gifts or giving massages. But kindness can also be built into the foundation of a relationship, into how partners interact with each other on a day-to-day basis.
One way to be kind is to think positively about your partner’s intentions. We know from the Gottmans’ research that “catastrophists” see negativity where there is none. For example, an angry wife might assume that when her husband didn’t put the toilet seat down, he was deliberately trying to make her angry. But he may have simply forgotten.
The ability to interpret your partner’s actions and intentions favorably can help soften the expression of conflict.
Another powerful kindness strategy revolves around shared joy. One of the telltale signs of “disasters” that Gottman studied was their inability to respond to the other’s news. When one person in a couple shared good news, the other responded dispassionately, with a comment like, “That’s good.”
Active constructive response.
We’ve all heard that partners should be there for each other when things are bad.Howevert research shows that being there for each other when things are going well is more important for the quality of a relationship. How a person responds to their partner’s good news can have serious implications for the relationship.
In one 2006 study, psychologist Shelley Gable and her colleagues wanted to know how partners would respond to good news from each other. They found that, overall, couples responded in four different ways, which they called passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.
Among the four response styles, the active constructive response is the kindest. In it, the partner expresses sincere joy and lively interest.
Any other response styles (indifference, ridicule, irony, anxiety) are joykillers. Only an active, constructive response allows a partner to enjoy joy and gives the couple the opportunity to unite thanks to good news. InGottman’sn language, an active constructive response is a way to “turn to” your partners (share good news) rather than “turn away” from them.
Active, constructive responding is crucial to healthy relationships. Psychologists have found that the only difference between couples who stayed together and those who broke up was active, constructive responses.
Those who showed genuine interest in their partner’s joys were more likely to stay together.
Resume.
There are many reasons why relationships fail, but if you look at what causes many relationships to fail, it is often a lack of kindness.
As the stresses of life multiply with children, careers, friends, family, and otherlifes nuances crowding out time for romance and intimacy, couples may abandon the work of building their relationship and allow petty complaints to tear them apart.
In most marriages, satisfaction levels drop off sharply during the first few years. But among couples who not only endure but live happily together for years and years, the spirit of kindness and generosity drives them forward. Become that couple! Remember that only attention and kindness strengthen relationships!
